Wesley Morris

Heymann's film was originally a six-part series for Israeli TV. The feature he and his crew have made smoothly truncates those three hours into a rich, discretely damning 85-minute portrait of intolerance.

You aren't likely to see a more ludicrous movie for the rest of the year. But rarely has such ludicrousness been used to pay tribute to a town in need of love. Déjà Vu is generic enough to have been filmed anywhere. But it happens to be set in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Unfortunately, there's never a moment where you can't see Anderson and his co-writer, Will Conroy, yanking on the strings.

Metz is another artist more interested in war's side effects than combat itself, although he and his crew are embedded for battle.

The ballad as it turns out is a duet between a dad and his girl, who'd often rather accentuate the positive than exploit pain, quietly proving that she is her father's daughter.

Plays like a holy, erotic mood piece, steeped in so much subdued jungle fever that it practically runs on photosynthesis.

Like its stunt work, the movie is both ridiculously hyperactive and a muscular feat of absolute confidence. I don't expect to have a more adrenalizing time at the movies this summer.

There's a misery in Fassbender that's spellbinding. I rolled my eyes for most of Shame. But never at him. That face tells the story of addiction: the joylessness of sex.

All the gears, in fact, are shamelessly visible, yet they lock smoothly and resonantly into place. If Akeelah and the Bee is a generic, well-oiled commercial contraption, it is the first to credibly dramatize the plight of a truly gifted, poor black child.

The movie's sense of inspiration is realistic. It never implies a future of glamour, only hard-won success.

An ecstatic sensory experience so overloaded it hardly matters that the narrative has been placed on a back burner.

If there's nothing here for romantics, there's even less for gourmands. Nettelbeck fails to produce a good food metaphor, let alone an impressive, palate-aching preparation montage

The film sends you home moved and in a tuneful mood.

The movie feels exhaustive in its loaded 90-something minutes, showing and telling us much while leaving the meaning of the tangles and twists in this family open to interpretation. For once, the tip of the iceberg is enough.

The movie charts its nine-game winning streak and post-season. If there's a problem, it's that there are too few moments like that one with Chavis in the locker room.

The most interesting thing about Smashed is the way Kate, the movie's alcoholic schoolteacher, never looks drunk - at least, not the way drunk people do in the movies.

It doesn't take its ideas or its audience far enough. The result is a humanist potboiler.

Looks and feels like someone else's better-made schlock.

The Treatment fails to do anything interesting with Jake.

Written in wisps and watery double-entendres by Heather McGowan and Niels Mueller, and the movie is so benign that its proceedings are beside the point.

Everyone Else is not about hurricanes and earthquakes and knives in the back. It's about private, emotional phenomena: the tiny tremors and imperceptible shifts that bring a couple closer together or drive them apart, almost without their noticing.

Comes on as both a rebuke to male vanity and a chic metaphor for midlife panic.

Meanders around Holly Springs, Mississippi, with the fuzzy benevolence of a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation.

As ridiculous German suspense dramas go, you could do worse than Jerichow.

This is a movie from the past that's also eerily of a piece with the film culture of now and tomorrow.

Despite Aniston's hard work, Good Girl could be better.

The film is often at odds with itself as a sincere work of romantic comedy, as Wilder's sometimes were, too. Nonetheless, it's determined to keep Clooney's considerable comedic skills front and center. He's never been looser, sexier, or more antic.

Despite its contradictions, the film stayed with me after I left the theater. It's frivolous. But it's also powerfully surreal.